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I know from experience automatically letting 'upgrades' run can cause problems.
So: I downloaded latest 'Zone Alarm Free Antivirus & Firewall version'
I then uninstalled my current version and reinstalled new version.

All went well...until I came to shutdown...Normally around 30 seconds, now it was taking over twice that
.
I went into 'Safe Mode' and checked shutdown time from there...lightning fast.

I opened 'Regedit' > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control I checked 'WaitToKillServiceTimeout': it was set at I believe the default '12000' = 12 millisecs.
I changed this to '10' millisecs...but shutdown time was still as above

At times it is very difficult to uninstall an antivirus completely. If Zone Alarm has an uninstall tool, try using that to uninstall, again. I would try to reinstall and see if you get any better results.

Tried re-installing but no joy. All residual files cleaned by uninstaller. As I said, I've been using this software for ages, including various updates etc but never had this shutdown problem afterward.
No other software has been added or taken from my system and the shutdown was fine before the ZA new install.

richc is probably right as rain; when I added WinAntiRansom into my soup of Win-products, my Mozilla Thunderbird had to be replaced with eM Client. Very slow startups and/or very slow restarts/shutdowns can definitely be caused by clash[es] bigtime. I'll be watching this thread, 'cause momentarily my desktop at home is very very slow on the startup. In short, for you and me, newer this, newer that, drivers, EXEs, etc. definitely clashing with something old, something blue, something borrowed or paid for.

I've got the same problem here. I've used ZA for many years with no problems until the last upgrade. This is on a very fast computer with SSD and very fast startups/shutdowns but now it hangs on shutdown forever. Many minutes - and I always have to power it off to get it completely off. But if I exit ZA before shutdown it goes down fine and fast. Very annoying as I am so used to just hitting shutdown that most of the time I forget to exit ZA. Then windows comes up saying it wasn't shutdown properly. It concerns me it may be scrambling the hard drive at times. There doesn't seem to be any way to directly ask ZA about this nor is there any info on this problem in their Q&A or forums I can find.

I have ZA's firewall only. I run Avira for AV. I tried some tips here to show the shutdown with verbosity added in registry and using gpedit.msc but nothing showed up. I then wrote a script (batch file) using these commands:
taskkill /F /PID 5012
taskkill /F /PID 4884
shutdown /s /f /t 0

The PID's are for zatray.exe and ZAPrivacyService.exe and you have to use the PID with /F rather than /IM or it won't work. I had to add the script to the shutdown using gpedit.msc in the computer config > Windows settings > scripts > shutdown and ALSO to the User config > Windows settings > scripts > Logoff.

I also made an Icon for the batch file but in case I forget to click that for shutdown it also seems to work now with clicking the regular shutdown from the Start menu after adding it with gpedit as mentioned above. Not really the solution I wanted but it works and avoids having to power it off forcibly.

That's probably a good idea although I doubt it effects all computers - probably just a certain combo of things that create the issue. I did finally find a way to send ZA tech support a message about the issue. If I get any response I'll post it here.

Anyone tried Zone Alarm with Windows 7?Anyone tried Zone Alarm with Windows 7?
Versions 9.0.083.000 won't install on Windows 7 and there is an implication on the CheckPoint site that the version for Windows 7 will be called Zone Alarm 2010.
Is this available yet?

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